Posts Tagged: Global Warming

Want a real change, and see Sanders as that chance? Good. But talk is cheap; besides supporting him with (even small) donations, show up to VOTE. Amazing the numbers of people who talk politics who later don’t vote. They claim there’s no meaning in it voting. They’re wrong.

If enough people had shown up for Gore at the voting booths in 2000, we would’ve had enough votes to overcome the voter suppression happening in Florida, the vote wouldn’t have gone to the Supreme Court, Gore would have been elected handily, and we wouldn’t have had an Iraq war–Gore absolutely would not have got us into Iraq. Indeed, we might well not have had the 9/11 attack which, I believe, could have been stopped except for the incompetence of Condie Rice and the Bush administration in general. They weren’t paying attention to the signs. A Gore administration would have been more pro active, would have stopped it–the indicators were there.

And Gore was very much concerned about global warming/climate change long before 2000. Remember “An Inconvenient Truth”? He would have done something about it back when it would have been a great help.

Make sure you’re registered to vote; ask your friends to register to vote. That’s what Sanders supporters need to do: get the vote out.

I believe–I have no documentation at hand however–that this is how it came about that Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton promoted fracking: At the time, natural gas was thought to be a good compromise with the fuel industry–and in itself it *was* good. Natural gas was still the fuel biz’s product, making them happy when it was sold, and when it burns, it burns very cleanly. So a win/win.

Then the fuel companies said, in effect, “We will run short of natural gas that is easily reached. But if we do more of this *harmless* process, fracking, we can have natural gas more and using natural gas will reduce pollution.”

It was explained how fracking was “safe”. And she and Obama fell for this. They made the mistake of believing industry “science”.

So they got behind it. Neither one knew that fracking would cause pollution of groundwater and, possibly, earthquakes. They’re probably still both in denial or dragging their feet on it because a world leader hates to reverse course.

But I think they will have to reverse course on this. The evidence is piling up. A consensus is building. People who are part of the Republican base, as well as Democratic, are being hurt by fracking.

As for why Hilary Clinton as Secretary of State “sold it to the world”, as the UK Guardian described it, the administration figured that encouraging more natural gas use globally in place of other more polluting fuels reduces the worst kind of carbon footprint and, importantly, helps stimulate America’s economy by helping American businesses that worked overseas. “We’ll be able to do more investment in America, Barack and Bill, if you push this!”

Just a soothing thought to help you sleep…I am very much afraid that by 2035, the social pressures from populace displacement in the wake of rising seas and droughts and other famine-inducing climate problems, along with ever proliferating weaponry, confrontational cultures, xenophobic anxiety, and simple survival fears, will be magnified by crisis level population growth. Population density, past 8 billion, will amplify all those stresses, more crowding increasing tension and competition for scarce resources…leading to a peak of volatility. In short–the chances of violence will be vastly increased.

Violence, en masse and small scale, will reach a dramatic historic peak, a tsunami of bloodletting, a paroxysm of catharsis.

Just waves of violence rolling around the world…and then the population will be much reduced. What a miserable way to do it.

Some glibly cite reports that population is diminishing but in fact it’s only the *rate of increase* that is starting to diminish. According to reports from the UN and other groups, overall population will continue to increase across the globe until around 2050. Meanwhile, we’ll get up to 9 billion people halfway through the century.

If you want to do something about the risk of increased violence from all these factors, work to reduce carbon pollution and thus slow climate change. Education, too, can work against violence so support education and outreach where you can…

Conservation and education, taken together, comprise the best hope for our grandchildren and great grandchildren.

“Mushrooms…I think there’s still mushrooms around. I’m pretty sure. But the cheese…milk’s like really super expensive, they don’t have regular cheese. Something about the droughts, nothing to feed the cows, from that global warming stuff. But they got a choice of mother’s milk cheese imported from India, or the synthetic ‘Can’t Tell It’s Not Milk’ cheese…Synthetic’s way cheaper.”

“Uhhhh….the synthetic cheese. With mushrooms.”

“Trill! Meet you there.”

From an actual piece in NewScientist Magazine: “In a small patch of the Southern Ocean, the shells of sea snails are dissolving. The finding is the first evidence that marine life is already suffering as a result of man-made ocean acidification. “This is actually happening now,” says Geraint Tarling of the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, UK. He and colleagues captured free-swimming sea snails called pteropods from the Southern Ocean in early 2008 and found under an electron microscope that the outer layers of their hard shells bore signs of unusual corrosion. As well as warming the planet, the carbon dioxide we emit is hanging the chemistry of the ocean.